A few weeks ago one of the boys on my son's baseball team got hit in the wrist with a high fastball. It was probably sailing about 50 mph when it smacked and broke three bones in the kid's arm. He dropped his bat and ran away from home plate in pain, gripping his elbow and trying not to swear. When he got close to the dugout one of our coaches wanted to test it out, see if the kid could still play, so he gripped that broken wrist and asked the kid if it hurt. The kid passed out so fast I thought he'd break his collarbone. Later he told us he must have gone into shock from the pain.

The next game a kid from the opposing team tried to steal second and jammed his leg against the base. We all heard his leg snap Joe Theismann-like and we all simultaneously cringed and moaned. Players from both teams gathered around this kid so tightly that we couldn't see the fallen player any more.

The league director was called over and one woman rushed by saying she was a nurse. And then the paramedics arrived quickly and they tried to open this tight band of ball players who were wrapped like a prayer circle around the victim. The mother, who had not been at the field when it happened (perhaps she was toting another child to another place, perhaps she had just gone back to her car to get her sunglasses), was beside herself, running out on the field. "What happened? What happened? You called the paramedics? I could have brought him to the ER myself. What? It's that bad?" I felt for her and knew that it was especially hard to have missed the accident, to come on to the scene of her young son's break only after the fact. And then there was our own injured player, who was sitting behind the fence with us parents, gripping his elbow again, the memory of his own pain front and center on his mind.

Though relatively small and minor, I recall these moments of pain and trauma after watching all the news about our collapsed river bridge here in Minneapolis. Our bodies, our everyday movements are so fragile.

It was a nice night and we were out walking and grilling and tending the garden when the 35W bridge collapsed, so we heard about it from our Colorado relatives, who had called to see if we were okay. God this stuff happens right in our own backyard, just a few blocks from our daughter's campus apartment--on our mighty river, the one she rowed with her crew team nearly every day last term--just one bridge over from where our good friend drives home every night, and look what happened! That could have been her. That could have been us. That could have been you. We think of our other personal near-misses (the night my Dad's apartment building was bombed in Saigon and the chaplain came over to sit with my mom until we heard word that Dad was okay; and, of course, 9/11). And we grimace and wince with those memories of pain and injury, and we fret over the way things fall apart when we're not there, but could have been, might have been. We sit in tight circles and watch, amazed that the bus of schoolkids just barely made it across, amazed that the surface of that fallen highway normally packed with commuters lies on top of the water like an old empty barge.

We are all okay at our house and hope you and yours are, too.